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Excellent list!  Also check out "Who Owns the Media?" http://goo.gl/O18r excerpt: "For decades, the mainstream media in the United States was accustomed to being able to tell the American people what to think.  Unfortunately for them, a whole lot of Americans are starting to break free from that paradigm and think for themselves.  A Gallup survey from earlier this year found that 60 percent of all Americans "have little or no trust" in the mainstream media.  More people than ever are realizing that the mainstream media is giving them a very distorted version of "the truth" and they are increasingly seeking out alternative sources of information.  In the United States today, just six giant media corporationscontrol the mainstream media.  Those giant media corporations own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many prominent websites.  But now thanks to the Internet the mainstream media no longer has a complete monopoly on the news.  In recent years the "alternative media" has exploded in popularity.  People want to hear about the things that the mainstream media doesn't really want to talk about.  They want to hear news that is not filtered by corporate bosses and government censors.  They want "the truth" and they know that they are not getting it from the mainstream media. We are watching a media revolution happen, and many in the mainstream media are totally freaking out about it.  In fact, some in the mainstream media have even begun publishing articles that mock the American people for not trusting them. " Anyone that does not acknowledge that the mainstream media has an agenda is not being honest with themselves.  The mainstream media presents a view of the world that is very favorable to their big corporate owners and the big corporations that spend billions of dollars to advertise on their networks.  The mainstream media is the mo

I've been disgusted with American mainstream media and our political class for a very long time. Every now and then I get super-disgusted.  I'll begin with the Obama Administration. They tried to make political hay with something that should not have been made public other than notifying the released American prisoners' parents before the prisoner had been debriefed. Moreover, while I have no problems with swapping Taliban prisoners to get the American prisoner back even if it meant not giving Congress the full 30-day notice required by statute, the Administration certainly could have done a better job of it, notifying key committee members earlier that the deal might be pulled off. Waiting until the Taliban prisoners were up to the steps of the airplane bound for the exchange was not the way this should have happened. Next up, we have the members of Congress who have done their level best to turn the situation into a partisan issue. Obama may have deserved criticism given that he tried to make political hay with the release. But prisoner swaps during wartime have been a feature of most U.S. wars. It is an ancient custom of war and procedures for doing so are even enshrined in the Geneva Conventions governing warfare. So far, I have not heard any war veteran member of Congress scream about releasing terrorists. During my 2+ years in a Viet Nam combat role, the thought of being captured was horrifying. Pilots shot down over North Viet Nam were the lucky ones. No American soldier captured in South Viet Nam was ever released. The enemy was fighting a guerrilla war in the South. They had no means to confine and care for prisoners. So captured American troops were questioned for intelligence and then killed.  Truth be told, American combat troops were prone to killing enemy who surrendered. War is a very ugly situation and feelings run high. It is perhaps a testament to the Taliban that they kept Sgt. Berdahl alive. Certainly that fact clashes irreconcilably with

Personally, I suspect the fact that mainstream media's journalism standards have dropped as MSM ownership has been consolidated into 6 giant corporations might have far more to do with the decline. So declined too has been the relevance of editorial focus. In other words, MSM has only itself to blame for the public's loss of confidence. Fortunately, we've seen the rise of independent investigative journalism via the internet. Alternative media now offers far richer sources of information than MSM, once you learn to filter unreliable sources.

It really says something about mainstream media when a story as explosive as Sy Hersh's new report on Obama's decision to postpone and then cancel military strikes on Syria is ignored by mainstream media. Hersh is one of the most respected of American war and intelligence journalists. 

This is good news to me. Al Jazeera America ("AJAM") was a big disappointment and was coupled with geo-blocking the U.S. from internet access to Al Jazeera English, which is a stunningly great news operation.  Blame the cable television companies, who made it a condition of carrying AJAM that all of its content had to originate in the U.S., preventing AJAM from showing the content generated by Al Jazeera English.  It was pure censorship, almost undoubtedly as the result of pressure from the U.S. government on the cable companies. AJAM hired staff away from other cable news competitors in the U.S., resulting in journalism that was far more like CNN than that of Al Jazeera English, just more mainstream media mush rather than having any unique editorial policy.    The Al Jazeera international organization is headquartered in Doha, Qatar and is partially subsidized by the Qatar ruling family. The Al Jazeera English news organization produces content in the finest hard-hitting British journalism style. Unfettered by the need to attract and keep advertisers, its staff has been left remarkably free to pursue stories that they want to write, with an understandable residual avoidance of criticism for the Qatar government. But as to any government in the world, they are cut no slack at Al Jazeera English. Al Jazeera English is unique in my mind because it qualifies both as mainstream media and as a source of consistently hard-hitting journalism. That is not true of any other mainstream media outlet that I know of. I'm looking forward to not having to fire up the Tor browser to evade the geoblocking and access Al Jazeera English. 

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has some very harsh words for Barack Obama and some good advice as well. I was a little slowed-down by McGovern's use of the term "right wing" to describe television networks; dumping on Sgt. Bergdahl certainly wasn't confined to Fox News; it's happening throughout mainstream media.  Then I realized that he was using the term in the sense employed nearly everywhere but in U.S. mainstream media land; "right-wing" denotes a position that supports maximal government power and minimizes the citizenry's rights. "Left-wing" takes the opposite tack. And within those senses, McGovern is absolutely correct to brand all of mainstream media as right-wing. They're virtually all pro-oligarchists peddling American exceptionalism fascism under an imperial presidency as being good for all Americans.      

I'm not the only one who questions why the 28--pages controversy erupts in mainstream media when all other questions about 9-11, for example the evidence of neocons and Israelis still has the MSM blackout. And why can I find no hard information on the Web about who is behind 28pages.org?

The scary part is that Alexander apparently believes Congress will pass such legislation and the Supreme Court will uphold it. That's despite even mainstream media having declared open season on the NSA because of government prosecutions of members of the media for publishing leaks and prosecutions of members of the media for refusing to reveal sources.  

The Senate Committee on the Judiciary reports with a do-pass recommendation a bill to grant a "covered journalist" a limited testimonial privilege against revealing news sources. But the attempt to grant such a shield to mainstream media reporters not only runs afoul of the First Amendment as indicated by the quoted minority view, but also a denial of equal protection of the law for non-mainstream media investigators and lowly citizens. The core problem is the Supreme Court has invariably held that members of the press have no greater protection under the first amendment than the lowly pamphleteer, hence the denial of Equal Protection of the law in this legislation.  The legislation is in direct response to government surveillance of the press and reporters being required by the courts to reveal their sources of classified information. 

It says something about how lawless the federal government has become that CIA still has no Congressional authority to do anything other than gather intelligence. No legal authority for overthrowing foreign governments, waging proxy wars, inflicting drone strikes, for none of its cloak-and-dagger operations. 

Thanks to Marbux we have this extraordinary collection of facts and figures describing the economic catastrophe that has hit the USA.  excerpt: "What a year 2012 has been!  The mainstream media continues to tell us what a "great job" the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class.  It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening.  If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse, millions of jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be suffocated, the middle class will continue to collapse, and poverty in the United States will continue to explode.  Just "tweaking" things slightly is not going to fix our economy.  We need a fundamental change in direction.  Right now we are living in a bubble of debt-fueled false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce, but when that bubble bursts we are going to experience the most painful economic "adjustment" that America has ever gone through.  We need to be able to explain to our fellow Americans what is coming, why it is coming and what needs to be done.  Hopefully the crazy economic numbers that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up. The end of the year is a time when people tend to gather with family and friends more than they do during the rest of the year.  Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help start some conversations about the coming economic collapse with your loved ones.  Sadly, most Americans still tend to doubt that we are heading into economic oblivion.  So if you have someone among your family and friends that believes that everything is going to be "just fine", just show them these numbers.  They are a good summary of the problems that the U

A decision today by the Supreme Court regarding the FCC's regulation of indecency in television  broadcasts is being widely misreported in mainstream media as authorizing nudity and profane language on television.  The decision actually struck down a pair of FCC decisions enforcing its regulation on grounds that the regulation as applied in those two cases was too vague to put broadcasters on notice that their particular broadcasts crossed any legally definable line. As discussed in the linked article, the decision does not prohibit the FCC from enforcing its regulation in differering situations. The FCC may continue to so or more likely will rewrite its regulation to be more explicit. The decision therefore sets the stage for a later case that might reach the First Amndement constitutional issues.  In other words, mainstream media gets it wrong again. 

I'm reserving judgment on this deal until I can read it. I am deeply suspicious of the mainstream media coverage of the deal, which is driven entirely by the White House and by spokesmen of AIPAC-founded organizations known to represent the views of the right-wing pro-war Israeli government (although not identified as such). As reported in the NY Times, Washington Post, Al-Jazeera-America, and the Jerusalem Post, the deal so lopsidedly disfavors Iran -- along with other factors -- as to provoke the suspicion that I'm reading propaganda rather than accurate reporting. Certainly, the accounts make no effort at all to present the Iranian government's reaction. Not a single sentence. The Iranian Press so far has only a few paragraphs that read as though they might have been garnered from what has been published by western mainstream media, although I did see a statement attributed to an anonymous Iranian government official who said that the deal recognizes Iran's right to enrich uranium. Obviously there is not yet an official statement by the Iranian government.  The mystery at this point is why America's Israel-Firsters fought to scuttle this negotiation so hard but are suddenly bubbling with enthusiasm for the interim deal. My strong sniff is that Obama has secretly promised the Israeli government a carrot that they could not refuse. Keep in mind that this entire charade is not in reality about Iranian nuclear weapons plans that do not exist. It's been about whether the U.S. will buckle to Israeli and American Zionist pressure to commence a war against Iran. So did Obama just secretly agree to launch that war via a false flag excuse? Something else? What is that carrot? Something reeks here.

Stephen Lindman unwinds the mainstream media/U.S. political spin on the Iran/P5+1 interim agreement, summarizing and linking the actual text. As suspected, Iran got way more from the deal and gave up less than reported by mainstream media. My analysis: The spin is mainly based on provisions that are largely meaningless to Iran because it had and has no nuclear weapon ambitions. I now have a strong sniff that the P5+1 negotiation is aimed at removing Israel's excuse (Iranian nuclear weapon threat) for pushing the U.S. and NATO to commence war against Iran and that is the real reason for the War Party's rage against the interim deal. Obama is trying to do this as an executive agreement among the negotiation parties, rather than as a treaty that would require Senate super-majority approval.  But he may face a problem in that regard because of a single agreement provision: "The U.S. Administration, acting consistent with the respective roles of the President and the Congress, will refrain from imposing new nuclear-related sanctions." That carefully crafted sentence would seem to leave Congress free to enact further sanctions if it can overcome an Obama veto, which requires a supermajority in both houses of Congress. The sentence is, however, susceptible to deliberate misportrayal as a provision tying the hands of Congress too in order to attack the agreement as requiring approval by the Senate, cries of outrage about Obama usurping the Congressional role, etc. But there is a body of case law holding that some classes of "executive agreements" do not rise to the level needed to invoke the Constitution's Treaty Clause. Personally, I think that body of case law constitutes unlawful judicial amendment of the Constitution, but it exists. So litigation over the issue in regard to this agreement is unlikely to get any traction.  

Note how Obama is not winning over the press with his legislation to give reporters for mainstream media a special privilege from some types of surveillance. When last I checked, that effort had bogged down in the effort to define "journalist" in a way that did not include every blogger on the planet. Small wonder: the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that there is no constitutional basis for a special protection for journalists *because the lone, anonymous pamphleteer has the same Freedom of the Press that mainstream journalists have.* I rarely make absolute predictions about what courts will do in the future, but this is black-letter First Amendment law. The legislation is doomed to be voided by the courts even if passed. Big, big denial of equal protection by the First Amendment. There is no alternative to ending the government surveillance except forfeiture of our freedoms.   

Nicely and throughly documented expose of false reporting in mainstream media about U.S. arming and traning the "moderate" Syrian opposition since 2013.  

Lots of documentation on the tawdry moves by the War Party in Libya and Benghazi, now blowing up in their faces.